oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What
could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, "lay his head to
the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the
snows?

He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the
Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one
slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery,
St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's
cave close by in the rocks above. At the end of May he came back to
England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The
subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the
Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in
papers embedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse
Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der
Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English
public the subject was a fresh one. To Ruskin it was familiar: he had
been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of
twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly
thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the
intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer
and note-book. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections,
and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he
had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palaeontology.
He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was
fixed on the structure of mountains--the relation of geology to scenery;
a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more
about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most
artists.

As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the
Salève, on which he had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the
top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville--one of
his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had
found a gold-mine up there, and raised the price out of all reason.
Other attempts to make a home in the châteaux or chalets of Savoy were
foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his
scrambles on the Salève led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation
given by Alphonse Favre of the curious north-west face of steeply
inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage,
on the analogy of other Jurassic precipices. The Brezon--_brisant_,
breaking wave--he took as type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in
general, and his analysis of it was serviceable and substantially
correct.

This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr.
Jukes and others in _The Reader_, in which he merely restated his
conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a
thorough examination of the subject--but this is in the region of what
might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of
more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being
examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer
visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for
the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland,
partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg,
with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the burden of his real
mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a
quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to
English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of
currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together
more papers, not then published, in continuation of his "Munera
Pulveris."

Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more
friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work
had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always
with a patronizing tone, which the younger man's open and confessed
discipleship accepted and encouraged. This letter especially shows both
men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his "master"
cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the
temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach's sake:

"CHELSEA, 22 _Feby_, 1865

"DEAR RUSKIN,

"You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh'h what can I
say in ans'r? It makes me both sad and glad. _Ay de mi._

"We are such stuff,
Gone with a puff--Then
think, and smoke Tobacco!'

"The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh'h has charmed
the female mind. You forgot only the first chapter of
'Aglaia';--don't forget; and be a good boy for the future.

"The Geology Book wasn't _Jukes_; I found it again in the
Magazine,--reviewed there: 'Phillips,'[9] is there such a name? It
has ag'n escaped me. I have a notion to come out actually some day
soon; and take a serious Lecture from you on what you really know,
and can give me some intelligible outline of, ab't the
Rocks,--_bones_ of our poor old Mother; wh'h have always been
venerable and strange to me. Next to nothing of rational could I
ever learn of the subject....

[Footnote 9: "Jukes,"--Mr. J.B. Jukes, F.R.S., with whom Ruskin had
been discussing in _The Reader_. "Phillips," the Oxford Professor
of Geology, and a friend of Ruskin's.]

"Yours ever,

"T. CARLYLE."

CHAPTER IV

"SESAME AND LILIES" (1864)

Wider aims and weaker health had not put an end to Ruskin's connection
with the Working Men's College, though he did not now teach a
drawing-class regularly. He had, as he said, "the satisfaction of
knowing that they had very good masters in Messrs. Lowes Dickinson,
Jeffery and Cave Thomas," and his work was elsewhere. He was to have
lectured there on December 19th, 1863; but he did not reach home until
about Christmas; better than he had been; and ready to give the promised
address on January 30th, 1864. Beside which he used to visit the place
occasionally of an evening to take note of progress, and some of his
pupils were now more directly under his care.

It was from one of these visits to the College, on February 27th, that
he returned, past midnight, and found his father waiting up for him, to
read some letters he had written. Next morning the old man, close upon
seventy-nine years of age, was struck with his last illness; and died on
March 3rd. He was buried at Shirley Church, near Addington, in Surrey,
not far from Croydon; and the legend on his tomb records: "He was an
entirely honest merchant, and his memory is, to all who keep it, dear
and helpful. His son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to
speak truth, says this of him."

Mr. John James Ruskin, like many other of our successful merchants, had
been an open-handed patron of art, and a cheerful giver, not only to
needy friends and relatives, but also to various charities. For example,
as a kind of personal tribute to Osborne Gordon, his son's tutor, he
gave £5,000 toward the augmentation of poor Christ-Church livings. His
son's open-handed way with dependants and servants was learned from the
old merchant, who, unlike many hard-working money-makers, was always
ready to give, though he could not bear to lose. In spite of which he
left a considerable fortune behind him,--considerable when it is
understood to be the earnings of his single-handed industry and steady
sagacity in legitimate business, without indulgence in speculation. He
left £120,000 with various other property, to his son. To his wife he
left his house and £37,000, and a void which it seemed at first nothing
could fill. For of late years the son had drifted out of their horizon,
with ideas on religion and the ordering of life so very different from
theirs; and had been much away from home--he sometimes said, selfishly,
but not without the greatest of all excuses, necessity. And so the two
old people had been brought closer than ever together; and she had lived
entirely for her husband. But, as Browning said,--"Put a stick in
anywhere, and she will run up it"--so the brave old lady did not faint
under the blow, and fade away, but transferred her affections and
interests to her son. Before his father's death the difference of
feeling between them, arising out of the heretical economy, had been
healed. Old Mr. Ruskin's will treated his son with all confidence in
spite of his unorthodox views and unbusiness-like ways. And for nearly
eight years longer his mother lived on, to see him pass through his
probation-period into such recognition as an Oxford Professorship
implied, and to find in her last years his later books "becoming more
and more what they always ought to have been" to her.

At the same time, her failing sight and strength needed a constant
household companion. Her son, though he did not leave home yet awhile
for any long journeys, could not be always with her. Only six weeks
after the funeral he was called away for a time to fulfil a
lecture-engagement at Bradford. Before going he brought his pretty young
Scotch cousin. Miss Joanna Ruskin Agnew, to Denmark Hill for a week's
visit. She recommended herself at once to the old lady, and to Carlyle,
who happened to call, by her frank good-nature and unquenchable spirits;
and her visit lasted seven years, until she was married to Arthur
Severn, son of the Ruskins' old friend, Joseph Severn, British Consul at
Rome. Even then she was not allowed far out of their sight, but settled
in the old house at Herne Hill: